'Suffer the little children, and forbid them not ...'

There are times when the past comes back, even when one is 60 years and nearly 2,000 miles away from it. The sight of the hate-filled protestors in Murietta, Calif., a town just a few miles from where I was born and grew up, brought back memories of the past, and disgust for the present.

Ramona, the little town where I went to junior high and high school, is about 40 miles from San Diego, where I was born, and 60 miles from Tijuana. I grew up with many Latino schoolmates. One of my closest friends was Eleanor Solis. She never encountered any problems, and neither did the other Latino kids. The boys were sometimes called "Chicanos," but there were never any fights, and lots of "inter-ethnic" friendships and dating.

One summer, my father hired two men he called "wetbacks" to work on our farm. My sisters and I didn't even know what that term referred to; in those days no one we knew protested, and we were good friends with Jose and Eliseo. So I grew up pretty oblivious to racism. In the 1960s, the civil rights movement finally opened my eyes to the endemic racism in my country, and even in the church I had been raised in.

When, years later, I interviewed for a job at the University of Iowa Labor Center, Iowa had a Republican governor, Robert Ray, who, in 1979 opened his heart and our state to refugees from Southeast Asia. In the interview, when I asked about politics in Iowa, my soon-to-be boss said, "In Iowa, Republicans have a heart."

Now I hear another very different Republican governor express a level of callous indifference that I can scarcely fathom. And it brings to mind a famous story. When people wanted to bring some children to meet Jesus, the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus reprimanded the disciples, saying: "suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come unto me…"

Listen up, Governor, lest we start comparing the differences between Branstad of Iowa and Jesus of Nazareth.